"The Sopranos" followed the life of mobster and family man Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) as he juggled managing a crime syndicate and his personal life, and all of that was brought to an abrupt end in 2007 when the final episode ended with Tony looking up at the door opening at a family dinner before the show cut to black.

TV critics and authors Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall wrote "The Sopranos Sessions" to celebrate the show's 20th anniversary, and it features a series of new long-form interviews with series creator Chase, among other things.

Chase seems to confirm Tony's ultimate fate at the end of the series (H/T The Atlantic).

In one interview, Sepinwall asks Chase about the series' ending and having "two more years' worth of stories" to tell about Tony at one point in the series' planning.

"Yes, I think I had that death scene around two years before the end," Chase said.

"Tony was going to get called to a meeting with Johnny Sack in Manhattan, and he was going to go back through the Lincoln Tunnel for this meeting, and it was going to go black there and you never saw him again as he was heading back, the theory being that something bad happens to him at the meeting. But we didn’t do that."

HBO

That's not quite how it plays out in the actual final scene, but there are similar ideas at play here, prompting Seitz to then point out, "You realize, of course, that you just referred to that as a death scene."

And apparently Chase isn't too happy to have accidentally said that, with the follow-up response being a long pause before Chase says: "F**k you guys."

Of course, that was only one plan for the final episode, and not even the one we ended up getting, so it's safe to say that it probably isn't the definitive answer "The Sopranos" fans were hoping for.

Seitz and Sepinwall have also clarified in a Reddit AMA about the book that later in the interview, Chase reiterated that he deliberately made the ending a lot less clear cut than the original "he probably died, but you're not sure" plan.